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From the Ex-Country
Eugene Finn caught
up with director Joe Comerford after the Forerunner Screenings
at the Galway Film Fleadh where Joe was screening his three
shorts Emtigon (1970), Withdrawal (1972), Waterbag
(1984) as well as a test screening of his eighteen-year work-in-progress,
the startling collage/narrative, Rough Touch.
Joe Comerford: Well, it was a bit of
an unknown because this really could not have happened until
recently; partly because of a level of hostility towards people
involved in making films in that period. It had become a kind
of a liability, baggage that people have to carry. What you
could sense to some extent was that the experience of watching
these films had changed and also that people's expectation
of what Irish film is had changed. Anyway, I opted not to
show a feature, as I'd been working on Rough Touch
for many months – some of the footage was shot from the
70s to the 90s and some recently. I wanted to test it on an
audience to gauge the response to what it is trying to do.
There is a sense of things happening in
stages. Before Rough Touch I had done Waterbag
where I was also mixing abstraction with action. So, when
options opened up to complete Rough Touch, I realized
that digital would allow me to take the aesthetic to a point
where I couldn't even have comprehended before. I found that
it was the only way of going ahead; I didn't see that there
was any possibility for me in pursuing film because the means
of production wouldn't allow it.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland
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